Reflections on third-party validation of HYAS capabilties

It was the summer of 2019, and I spent an hour walking around downtown Los Altos in Silicon Valley with a serial entrepreneur and investor. He was telling me all about where he thought this relatively unknown cyber security company called HYAS could end up. I was consistently being told by multiple sources that “HYAS has data no one else has; they should be able to do things that no one else can do.” For a long time, the clients that trust and rely on HYAS on a daily basis have known and understood this fundamental point. Data is power and with that power, not only comes great responsibility, but amazing capabilities.

From a responsibility perspective, HYAS not only employs a full-time data privacy attorney for adherence to various compliance frameworks, we also maintain an ethics committee of who we will and won’t sell to. It may have been slightly awkward when I told an investor that we would not be selling our product to one of their introductions based on that ethics committee decision, but their guidance has served us well. I remember when a CISO from a health care client called me to understand whether we were aligned from a moral standpoint, both as individuals, and as companies. And yes, we were, and that ethics committee continues to be a driving force in everything we bring to market, how we do it, and who we will sell to.

From a capability standpoint, HYAS not only continually gathers unique and bespoke data, but assembles it in a proprietary graph database that is constantly evolving to represent the real-time view of adversary infrastructure on the Internet. Part of the intellectual property of HYAS is in the various data sources themselves and part of the intellectual property is how that data is assembled into the graph database, including how the connections between nodes are constructed and maintained. HYAS constantly grows by both adding new data sources, as well as identifying new ways to build correlations - meaning that the data lake itself is constantly growing, expanding, and essentially learning.

HYAS has published multiple internal studies demonstrating how powerful this data actually is in various HYAS blogs, but of course the ultimate proof is third-party validation. Today I’m thrilled, excited, and humbled by the recent report from AV-TEST. They tested and measured the power of the HYAS data by looking at the effectiveness of our Protective DNS solution, HYAS Protect, and their conclusion validates everything about that first conversation I had with my friend, the serial entrepreneur and investor.

By utilizing unique and bespoke data, assembled and correlated in the right way, HYAS has actually created the most effective Protective DNS solution on the planet. Not just by a few percentage points either … but in a very significant way. No longer can anyone claim that their existing solution is “good enough.” As new attacks continue to threaten organizations, and with CISA recommending Protective DNS as an essential part of their Shields Up initiative, it’s clear that Protective DNS is becoming not just mainstream, but critical to a modern security architecture.

There is a real value in increased efficacy – it’s different than a pointless “which bank has more ATMs” conversation. The latter ends up being a “good enough” discussion, but having a more effective Protective DNS solution can be the critical difference between business resiliency and business collapse. It can be the key addition to the security stack that allows you to actually sleep at night knowing that if something nefarious is actually going on inside the network, you will have the right level of visibility into it.

But it’s not purely an efficacy discussion either, because part of an effective solution is efficacy of course, but part of it is how the solution fits into the rest of the client architecture and security components. HYAS ensures that its unique solution integrates with the rest of an organization’s security stack. We adapt to each company’s unique security posture and requirements - not the other way around.

As one CISO said to me, installation is just “business as usual” - quick, easy, and painless. One large client actually deployed HYAS Protect across 23,000 endpoints in under 30 minutes, exactly because of these kinds of integrations.

Which brings me full circle to that first conversation. HYAS continues to grow and evolve, and the company continues to increase efficacy. But today, we finally have third-party validation of the central thesis behind the company – HYAS can achieve results that others cannot.

I’m incredibly excited and proud to be part of something that is truly changing the world. We give our clients the confidence that no matter how cyber attacks and threats evolve, HYAS will be there to help them drive business full forward and ensure business resiliency and ultimately, success.

Are you ready to protect yourself in a more dangerous cyber landscape? Move your business forward with HYAS today.